SHOWDOWN AT THE OASIS

It was a two-hour round-trip from Dave Carney’s New Hampshire home to the Hooksett election day festival but Carney had ample incentive to make the drive. He was about to become Don Green and Alan Gerber’s most beneficent patron. The previous summer, Carney had bought a copy of Get Out the Vote! after seeing it promoted in a Brookings Institution catalog as a “practical guide for anyone trying to mobilize voters.” The description applied to Carney, a Republican consultant who each year handled only a few campaigns, approaching each with an intensity that often frightened his colleagues as much as his opponents. From his desk in Hancock, he would sit watching an apple orchard bear its fruit while he listened in on conference calls and drafted strategy e-mails for Americans for Job Security. The corporate-funded group offered an independent boost to Republican candidates, usually by running ads that savaged their opponents, and to Carney it represented the kind of low-profile, high-paying mercenary work that sustained his business even as it failed to inspire him. For months, Get Out the Vote! had sat untouched, under drifts of polling binders, taking its place on an oddball desktop reading list that included—in roughly ascending order of centrality to Carney’s worldview—statistics texts, popular business books, Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Then, in November 2004, Carney prepared for a trip to Texas to meet advisers to Governor Rick Perry, his main political client and the one whose campaigns most inspired Carney, so the two could begin formal preparations for Perry’s bid for a second full term. Carney tossed the book into his briefcase as in-flight reading material.

In 2002, when he was directing Perry’s first gubernatorial campaign, Carney had helped to design a massive turnout operation, spending $4 million to pull voters to the polls, much of it concentrated during Texas’s two-week early-vote period. Carney’s forces, tapped from temp agencies statewide, indiscriminately knocked on doors in one thousand “fortress precincts,” as party operatives referred to the areas where they typically garnered more than 60 percent of the vote. At the same time, Texas Republicans hired Brent Seaborn, a junior staffer at Alex Gage’s firm, to draft a primitive microtargeting plan that would help locate conservative-minded independents who resembled potential Perry voters and could be persuaded on specific issues like taxes, education, or tort reform. (Texas voters do not register by party, but those who regularly choose to participate in a party’s primary are usually treated by strategists as though they were formally attached to it.)

Perry won the race by 18 points. Carney was pleased with the result, yet eager to find out who should deserve the credit. Had his unprecedented investment in a get-out-the-vote operation mobilized voters who would have otherwise stayed home? Did Seaborn’s data find Perry voters that the campaign would have otherwise ignored? Or had Perry just been a great candidate running in a conservative state as the heir to a popular governor now serving as a wartime president? After election day, Carney had asked Mike Baselice, Perry’s pollster, to commission a survey in search of answers, but he was unsatisfied with what the numbers told him.

Carney designed his own bootleg experiment for Perry. He took four demographically similar markets that could be isolated in a “bell-jar kind of a way,” as one Perry adviser described it, and assigned a treatment to each. In one city, Carney had the campaign buy newspaper ads; another got a blast of robocalls; the third received radio ads and a dusting of mail; the fourth just mail. It was out of an election cycle, so the messages referred to general issues in front of the state legislature rather than campaign themes. He had Baselice poll in each market before and after to measure Perry’s support among voters and their awareness of each issue. Carney attributed the differences in how public opinion moved in each market to the delivery mechanism: the radio and mail combination seemed to change minds slightly, while newspaper ads didn’t at all. “It wasn’t done in the truly academic sense, so you couldn’t say it doesn’t work,” Carney says of the after-action tests. “We just couldn’t show much tangible improvement.”

Somewhere between Manchester and Austin, it all started to make sense for Carney. As soon as he arrived in Austin, Carney went onto the Yale website and searched for e-mail addresses for Alan Gerber and Don Green. In their book, the political scientists lament that most of their field experiments up till that time had been of the same sort: working with nonpartisan groups on their efforts to turn out voters. The few times that Gerber and Green had been invited into candidate campaigns had been on small-scale local races. The next campaign on Carney’s docket was a wholly different affair. Perry had spent $25 million in 2002, and Carney anticipated a much tougher reelection in 2006, when voters were likely to have tired of Republicans and be eager for alternatives. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a popular Republican whom Carney had helped win her first election to the U.S. Senate, was considering a primary challenge, and a formidable Democratic threat likely followed in the fall. Carney had begun planning for a budget of $40 million, the bulk of which—as was typical in statewide races, especially with a geographically far-flung electorate like Texas’s—would naturally go to television and radio. “Would you be interested in being in a real campaign?” Carney wrote to Gerber and Green.

It was an audacious offer, inviting a pair of Yale political scientists into a Republican war room, not least because Perry’s exuberant anti-elitism was usually quite specific in its disdain for Ivy League credentials. “You don’t have to have a Ph.D. from Harvard in political science to understand our economics,” he would say. But it was another aspect of Perry’s personality—the fact that he was “a cheap bastard”—that made Carney think the governor would take to the idea of using academic researchers to effectively audit the campaign’s budget. “The fact that they had done all these studies that show mail and phones don’t work—I thought, ‘We spend a lot of money on mail and phones,’ ” says Carney. “If it’s not working, let’s spend it on things that do work, or don’t spend it.”

IN AN ERA of increased specialization among consultants, Carney thought his skill was simply politics. He had been enlisted onto his first campaign in 1978, when a Republican lawyer named Judd Gregg came to Carney’s high school social studies class and asked students to go door-to-door as volunteers on his campaign for New Hampshire’s executive council. In 1980, Carney spent the summer before his junior year at New England College working for John Sununu, a Tufts University engineer running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate. Sununu tapped Carney to be his field director, responsible for organizing town chairmen and arranging open houses where the candidate could meet local voters and activists. Carney became close to Sununu, sleeping in the candidate’s basement on the nights when he wasn’t forced to bunk in the walk-in cooler in the Manchester campaign headquarters that had been converted out of a defunct bagel shop. Sununu lost the Senate race but was elected governor two years later and brought Carney to the statehouse with him as a political adviser with responsibility for his biennial reelection campaigns.

Early in the 1988 cycle, Sununu endorsed George H. W. Bush for president and dispatched Carney to work on his New Hampshire primary operation. Every Monday at 7 a.m., Carney would help convene a group of around two dozen volunteers he called Bush’s Freedom Fighters to methodically trawl through a list of five thousand party activists and local officials in the state (which may have more elected officeholders per capita than any jurisdiction on earth). The Freedom Fighters would check in with those in their regions and report back on their preferences—this one is for DuPont, that one’s with Kemp—and then Carney would use computers to update the list and circulate a new one each week. At the same time, Carney and other staffers had phone banks call all Republican voters and independents who had previously participated in Republican primaries, to identify them, too.

The Friday before the primary, amid a snowstorm that had debilitated the state, bad news came in to Bush’s Concord headquarters. Retired general Al Haig was dropping out of the race and planned to endorse Bush’s rival Bob Dole. Carney’s office TV was fixed on C-SPAN2, whose cameras showed the empty ballroom at a Manchester conference center where Haig and Dole were to appear together to formalize the endorsement. But Carney’s Freedom Fighters were hard at work. Over several hours, they were able to call all seven hundred people in the state who had been tagged as Haig supporters and invite them to back Bush. Carney had Sununu call Haig’s leadership team to lobby them to switch, too. Many of them were learning the news for the first time when Bush’s campaign called: they had yet to hear from Haig or Dole. “To this day I’m convinced we knew more Al Haig supporters in the state than he did because of our canvassing,” says Carney. While Dole dominated news coverage, Bush was winning voters to his side. The following Tuesday, Bush won New Hampshire, finding a clear path to the nomination and eventually the presidency.

As something of a reward, Bush named Sununu to be his chief of staff, and Carney followed his mentor to the White House. Carney was a curiosity, a twenty-nine-year-old who became deputy political director to the president even though he had never worked in politics outside his home state. For his part, Carney was not desperate to be taken seriously: the six-foot-four, 325-pound Carney put a plaque on his desk that read THE BIG GUY and a “Buckaroo” pinball machine behind him, with toy airplanes and Happy Meal trinkets scattered elsewhere in his office. (Bush adviser Mary Matalin called Carney “Stud Muffin.”) Promoted after eighteen months to head the White House political office, Carney became responsible for managing the limited time the president had available to spend on politics, and he began speaking regularly to consultants working for Republican candidates nationwide, “because they’re all trying to get the president to do things for them—or not, depending on the situation.”

As Bush prepared for his reelection, Carney moved to the RNC and then to Bush’s campaign as political director. His first project was fending off a challenge from conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. After successfully dispatching Buchanan in a series of primaries, Carney found that the campaign had $7 million left in its nominating budget, which legally had to be spent before the party’s convention in August. It was by then becoming apparent that Bill Clinton would be the Democratic nominee, even though the Arkansas governor still had to slog through his own primary calendar with a depleted budget.

The Republicans had assembled a rich research dossier on Clinton’s weaknesses against Bush and had polls suggesting that public views of him could still be shaped. Carney proposed spending the $7 million to “destroy” Clinton—a plan that pitted Carney against the campaign’s lawyers, who told him that as a general-election tactic it couldn’t be covered with primary dollars. “It’s a totally legitimate expense,” Carney protested. “We’re going to show delegates to the Republican National Convention that we’re the strongest candidate for them to nominate to beat Bill Clinton.”

Carney decided he would try to prove the point. He got permission to use one-tenth of the primary budget for a rough test. He picked one suburban county in each of three competitive general-election states—Georgia, Colorado, and New Jersey—and divided them among three mail vendors. The consultants got a poll of their county, the campaign’s opposition research binder, and an assignment to design an anti-Clinton mail campaign for the county’s independents and Republicans. Each vendor settled on a different issue: voters in Georgia got a military-issues message, New Jerseyans heard about Clinton’s environmental record, and in Colorado a Texas consultant named Karl Rove produced a series of mail pieces about taxes. Afterward, Carney went back and polled the counties, finding a huge improvement in each. After the mailings, Bush led Clinton by nearly 20 percent in the Georgia and New Jersey counties. “In Colorado it was off the roof,” Carney recalls.

It was not a randomized trial, but Carney thought he had good evidence that if Bush committed the remaining $6.3 million in the primary budget to an early anti-Clinton campaign it could reposition the race in the incumbent’s favor. “Just pick four or five must-win states and we can crush them,” Carney argued. But the campaign leadership rejected the proposal, afraid it would draw unfavorable coverage for Bush, and refunded the millions to their donors. “From that point on, I realized there is a real benefit for not being a good team player,” Carney reflects. “It’s better to be a loud, obnoxious person.”

From Bush’s Washington headquarters, Carney would sit at the center of a constellation of more than fifty consultants and vendors, many of them grouped into regional teams, patching from one conference call to the next. He grew disgusted with the cautious, corporate nature of the reelection—seven people sharing top decision-making duties—and the inert campaign they ran. “There’s not much from that campaign I would recommend other campaigns to follow,” Carney reflects wryly. The most important lesson Carney took out of 1992 was one he taught himself with the mail test. “After that I realized campaigns were a lot more scientific, they were much more—I didn’t know the term measurable at the time,” he says, trailing off. “There was more to it than doing the same old thing over and over.”

AFTER BUSH’S LOSS, Carney went to work briefly for Senate Republicans, and then decided to start his own firm. Inevitably Carney would come to open an office on Pitt Street in Alexandria, Virginia. The port city, just across the Potomac from Washington, had been part of the original capital district and returned to Virginia’s control only in 1847, not long before the federal government stripped its principal economic engine by abolishing slavery. More than a century later, Alexandria’s Old Town neighborhood of Federal brick houses set on an eighteenth-century grid found its identity as a new-style company town. Just as the rest of Northern Virginia boomed from a growing federal government and its many private contractors, Old Town testified to the expansion of the political business, on house-museum scale. The neighborhood surrounding Carney’s office was a postindustrial cluster like the tech business that popped up around MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the full diversity of the consulting profession on display. There were media agencies, pollsters, direct-mail firms, fund-raisers, phone vendors, and public relations strategists, most selling themselves with a distinct strength or specialty. They had one thing in common: almost all the Old Town firms were Republican, drawn not only to rents and taxes lower than in Washington, but closer to the suburban homes where most of the capital’s conservative elite chose to live.

Yet despite working for more than a decade in campaigns, with several years at the highest level of national politics, Carney lacked a specialty. “He had good organizational skills and good political judgment,” says Charlie Black, who had been the Bush campaign’s chief spokesman. “He wasn’t particularly strong in terms of writing—he wouldn’t have become an ad guy—but he could have studied and been a pollster. The natural thing, though, was to be in campaign management.” The only way to be in campaign management without vagabonding around the country working full-time for candidates was to be a general consultant, a new role that had emerged to broker honestly between all the specialties fighting for shares of a campaign budget. A general consultant was usually the first person on board a campaign and responsible for designing a strategic plan, assembling a team of specialist consultants, and hiring a campaign manager who could oversee the day-to-day affairs of what in statewide races often grew into a decent-sized small business. “It’s like a general contractor and a foreman,” Carney says of the relationship between a general consultant and a campaign manager. “A general contractor works with the architect, the plumber, and all the contractors. There’s a foreman who’s on-site every day and makes sure people are banging the nails and getting stuff done and people are working.”

But Carney, who had recently married an RNC staffer named Lauren Zanca, thought Washington was a horrible place to raise their new child. In 1994, he returned to New Hampshire, moving into a big white clapboard house in Hancock, down the street from a Christmas tree farm and just one town over from where Carney had been raised. He and Lauren reopened their consulting business in an office above the garage, calling themselves Norway Hill Associates after their street address. Much of the decision to move concerned lifestyle: the couple couldn’t imagine paying twenty thousand dollars in private-school tuition annually, and they liked the sight of Mount Monadnock, supposedly the most-hiked peak in the United States, from the window of an office whose walls they had decorated with framed invitations and tickets to various Reagan and Bush inaugurals.

For Carney a rural New Hampshire mailing address was also an announcement of principle. He had intentionally withdrawn from an Old Town consulting scene he thought had become complacent, relying on media exposure to convince gullible candidates that the help were an indispensable part of the campaign. “There’s a lot of talent out in the countryside that gets dissed by Washington and is not the name brands,” says Carney. “But there are a lot of people who are really creative and are not concerned with what the Washington Post is going to write about them and more concerned with results.” Campaign managers, he thought, were drawn to brand-name, usually Washington-based consultants for the same reasons corporate executives believe that “if you pick IBM or AT&T you’re not going to get fired.” The consultant then builds an impressive roster of past clients, and a high-profile success or two can be enough to convert him into an indispensable man for the next manager who comes along. “The consultant or the staff person is more important than the candidate—‘You have to pay a lot of money for us to work for you’—that is crazy talk,” says Carney.

In June 1997, Carney was summoned to Austin by then Texas agriculture commissioner Rick Perry, who had begun his career as a Democratic legislator but had emerged as a force in the state’s Republican politics under the hand of Karl Rove. Perry was plotting a run the following year for lieutenant governor, a job with a robust set of constitutional powers and a great looming opportunity for promotion. Governor George W. Bush would also be on the 1998 ballot, but everyone knew he was looking ahead at an immediate presidential campaign. If he won, the lieutenant governor would fill half his gubernatorial term and have a big head start on the 2002 season. Bush understood this delicate dynamic and told Rove, whose mail and strategy business served many of the state’s Republicans, that he could work for no one else in 1998. Rove dropped Perry as a client and the agriculture commissioner gave Carney a call.

Carney was familiar with Texas politics from U.S. Senate campaigns and his time in the Bush White House, but he was certainly no Texan. He knew that Perry already had a loyal campaign manager and media consultant from past races, so Carney’s pitch to Perry was based in large part on the New Englander’s value as an outsider. It was important to hire a general consultant before hiring the rest of a campaign team, Carney asserted, because he could negotiate tough contracts with outside advisers. “Vendors like to get to the candidate directly; they like to seduce them, ingratiate themselves with them, and they end up signing these deals that end up being awkward and expensive to break,” Carney says. Then as the campaign progressed, Carney told Perry, he could keep those consultants focused on their strategic objectives even as short-term concerns and outside voices threaten to distract them. A general consultant, Carney liked to say, could keep the campaign on tempo and make sure everyone was hitting their notes. “I try to explain the general consultant is kind of like the conductor of an orchestra,” he says. “Having a plan holds everyone accountable. The candidate is accountable, the finance people are accountable, the campaign manager is accountable.”

In the closing days of a race, other recent statewide Texas races had crescendoed into a dissonant symphony of attack ads and defiant counterattacks, like the time in 1978 that Senator John Tower devoted a full thirty-second spot to explaining why he had been photographed refusing to shake hands with an opponent he accused of lying about Tower’s family. “My kind of Texan doesn’t shake hands with that kind of man,” Tower said. Carney explained to Perry that a general consultant could manage emotions at such moments. “Sometimes overreacting is a killer. Sometimes you want to overreact and destroy your opponent. There’s no guarantee what will work,” he says. In such situations all the consultants and vendors, Carney anticipated, would argue for their unique remedy: the media consultant with a last-minute ad, the mail vendor insisting that the final dollars fund a blast of brochures adding new facts to the conversation. “Of course a mail vendor is going to advocate for that, and a mail vendor should advocate that, because you think mail works and you wouldn’t be in the business if you didn’t think mail worked,” says Carney. “But you will save a lot of money at the end if you have someone at thirty thousand feet—someone who’s a little more objective, someone who is not as personally invested in the campaign.”

Carney noticed that this line seemed to appeal to Perry, whom he had never before met but quickly came to appreciate for their common suspicions of the political profession. Carney proposed that he take a smaller monthly retainer in exchange for a “win bonus,” to be paid out only if Perry became lieutenant governor. “Everyone has skin in the game,” Carney told Perry, explaining that such a pay structure would leave the campaign more money to spend on its own operations before the election. “If we win, we’ll raise the money. If we don’t win, we don’t need to spend the money.” Perry hired Carney that day, at a fee of five thousand dollars per month, and the general consultant got to work building his team.

Many of them, based in Austin, already knew Perry well. The campaign manager, Jim Arnold, had first interviewed for a job with Perry in 1990 as the recently converted Republican prepared his first statewide campaign, for agriculture commissioner. The media consultant, David Weeks, met Perry in 1985 at an air force base near Abilene, where Perry flew C-130s and Weeks was involved in community affairs. The two bought a plane together. “Of course he could fly and I couldn’t, so it was really his airplane,” says Weeks. “But in true Perry fashion I paid for it.” Mike Baselice, the pollster, had worked with Weeks on Kay Bailey Hutchison’s 1993 special election for Senate.

Consultants outside Perry’s inner circle, however, were extended little loyalty. Over the course of the 1998 campaign, Carney fired three consecutive mail vendors out of disappointment with their performance. “Campaigns are very overly cautious about terminating people,” Carney says. “It’s a lot easier than people think it is: pick up the phone and say, ‘Thanks a lot, buddy.’ ” (Those involved with the campaign suggest Carney’s actual words in those situations tended to be less gracious.) When an outside consultant or vendor disappointed him, Carney usually thought it was because they were overextended and not sufficiently invested in any of their races. So Carney made everyone who wasn’t on Perry’s payroll work for win bonuses, too, adjusting incentives to make sure their interests would align with the candidate’s. For professional fund-raisers, who typically earn a share of each check they bring in, Carney created two separate rates of commission: a high one on money raised from new Perry donors, and a much lower one on the presumably easy task of getting an established contributor to give again. “People keep on writing checks every year for a thousand bucks—we should pay the postal service a commission, you didn’t do anything,” says Carney.

“I’m a bigger believer in it now: as I get older I get more driven by the economics,” Carney says. “There’s a lot of money in politics and people should not get paid for poor performance. Yet a lot of vendors in politics, on both sides, get paid whether the campaign wins or loses. I’m not sure that’s a great incentive to win. So I’d rather pay somebody a lot of money to win, and less money just to put in effort. I don’t really care about efforts; I care about results. If a guy can create his TV ads sleeping in his boxer shorts in his mother’s basement, I don’t give a shit—I just want to win. So I’d rather pay the guy a lot of money for winning than pay him a bunch of money for working for us.”

There was something gleeful about the way Carney approached his fiduciary responsibilities. He had none of the accountant’s mien, instead guarding a campaign budget with the same competitive spirit that led him to hunker down with a poll and look for a niche of strategic opportunity. He was intently focused on defeating his client’s opponent, but first Carney knew he would have to contend with an intrasquad game and outfox the people who were supposed to be his colleagues. The pinball machine that had once brightened a White House office had been replaced in New Hampshire by a calvary sword, resting atop a bookshelf within permanent reach of Carney’s desk. He joked it was a defense against the election attorneys whose overlawyering had made campaigns timid and risk-averse.

As they plotted Perry’s campaign, Carney’s team feared their greatest problem would come from a supposed ally at the top of the Republican ticket. Bush was the type of popular incumbent governor who could sweep in other candidates on his coattails, but Perry advisers knew that Bush’s interests diverged from theirs. Bush’s reelection was a sure bet, but in preparation for a presidential bid, Rove was ambitiously aiming to win 70 percent of the vote. Such a sweeping victory would immediately validate the young governor as a plausible president, communicating to the national political community that Bush had broad reach and, especially, appeal among Hispanics. To get that share, Bush would have to turn out friendly Democrats. Perry, however, didn’t want to see any Democrats at the polls. His opponent, state comptroller John Sharp, was much more formidable than Bush’s. Rove’s strategy to market Bush as a bipartisan figure would likely trigger a flood of new Bush-Sharp ticket-splitters that would drown Perry at the polls.

When Baselice’s polls showed Perry’s lead over Sharp shrinking, Baselice repeatedly went to Carney and Perry to suggest it was time to attack Sharp. Perry usually deferred to his advisers’ strategic instinct, and agreed that Weeks should begin creating negative ads. But before Weeks could launch the ads, Perry would come back and say he had changed his mind. Someone appeared to be going around Carney and Jim Arnold and getting to the candidate directly, and everyone in Perry’s circle assumed it was Rove. One time, after learning that Perry had once again vetoed plans to begin a negative-ad campaign against Sharp, Carney punched a hole in the wall of Arnold’s office out of frustration. He suspected that Rove, who liked to present himself as the strategist who had turned Texas red, was sabotaging Perry’s campaign.

Bush won his race by more than 37 points, Perry his by less than 2. “Depending on who you talk to, he was either carried on Bush’s coattails or there were no Bush coattails,” says Arnold. As Perry held a slim lead over Sharp on election night and prepared to declare victory, he stopped on his way to the podium at the Austin Convention Center and pulled Carney, Weeks, and Baselice close. “I’m never going to allow anybody else to dictate the direction of our campaigns again,” Perry told his advisers.

IN 2005, four academics walked into the PlainsCapital Bank building on Congress Street in Austin, two blocks south of the Texas State Capitol and around the corner from the Texans for Rick Perry headquarters. The campaign’s conference room could barely fit ten, and so whenever a meeting demanded more attendees, they were left to rent out a restaurant or reserve a conference room in the offices of the bank where campaign chairman James Huffines served as president. After their first e-mail exchange the previous fall, Carney had extended the type of invitation Gerber and Green had hoped to receive since they first hit the New Haven sidewalk but never actually expected to see. The idea that the offer would come with the personal sign-off of “the most conservative governor in the country,” as Carney insisted on labeling Perry, was a particular surprise. Green immediately knew that he and Gerber would come under suspicion as “two guys from Yale who wouldn’t probably vote for Governor Perry ever,” as Carney describes them, and looked for wingmen who might be more ideologically in sync with Perry’s circle.

It was not hard to pick out the two Republican professors. They were the ones who didn’t look like academics. Daron Shaw, a young San Diegoan with Ken-doll looks and a surfer’s frame, had worked on the polling team of George H. W. Bush’s 1992 campaign before completing his graduate work in political science. Two years later, Shaw joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where a colleague introduced him to Karl Rove, who was then advising George W. Bush’s second gubernatorial campaign at the same time he worked to complete his undergraduate degree. (In 1971, Rove had dropped out of the University of Utah to become executive director of the College Republican National Committee as the group prepared for Richard Nixon’s reelection.) The two started meeting regularly for lunch, and Rove, who had an autodidact’s fascination with American history, was eager to learn political science theories he could apply to the campaigns he understood only in anecdotal terms.

In the spring of 1999, Rove hired Shaw to work as director of election studies in the fourteen-member strategy department of Bush’s presidential campaign. Early every morning Shaw would arrive at headquarters to sort through the reams of polling that had arrived overnight from around the country, and begin analyzing it so that the campaign could shift its resources accordingly among battleground states. He was called “Dr. Shaw” by younger colleagues, a title intended with deference that couldn’t help but sound sarcastic given the nicknames that usually circulate on campaigns. (Early in his career, Bush had dubbed Rove “Turd Blossom.”) But the acknowledgment of Shaw’s scholarly credentials, and the fact that he was constantly shuttling between Bush’s headquarters and his university office blocks away, highlighted the unusual nature of his moonlighting. While academics often advised candidates on policy matters, it was rare for one of them to maintain a staff job as a political operative working on the exact tactics he studied. Shaw’s research focused on electoral-college strategies, and his terms for accepting Rove’s job offer was that after the election he would have access to all of Bush’s internal polling and media-buying data. (Previously he had had to scrounge for files from former campaign strategists, like the battered box of unsorted folders with all of Bob Dole’s TV purchases that sat beneath Shaw’s desk.)

Green called Shaw about the Perry project in early 2005, at the same time he roped in James Gimpel, another clean-cut young political scientist who had worked for Republicans in the federal legislative and executive branches before beginning a teaching career at the University of Maryland. In 2001, Rove had suggested that Shaw recruit political scientists to an “Academic Advisory Council” to consult with the Republican National Committee on its 72-Hour research as well as broader electoral trends. Could Shaw round up other conservative scholars who would be friendly to Bush’s objectives? Rove asked.

“Jeez, Karl, I don’t know how many of those are out there,” Shaw told him.

“Well,” replied Rove, “let’s expand the definition to being nonhostile.”

Shaw ended up identifying eight academics who met the standard, including Gimpel, and Rove called them his “Team B.” (The political professionals were Team A.) When the Academic Advisory Council gathered in Washington in late 2001 to preview the next year’s midterm elections, Gimpel arrived with a list of industrial midwestern counties where he said Bush had suffered in 2000 because younger Republicans had turned out at dismal rates. A renewed sense of civic interest after September 11 could offer a window to register and mobilize young conservatives, Gimpel suggested, a project best accomplished by mining his county data to identify precincts with the best combination of young populations and Republican performance. It was in many ways a classic Gimpel subject: his specialty was political geography, with a focus on the spatial dimension of campaigns. His work with the RNC gave Gimpel access to the party’s national voter database, making him one of the rare political scientists comfortable with the same tools that campaign operatives used.

None of the four academics who had signed on with Perry expected that they would do much but repeat many of the straightforward voter contact experiments that Gerber and Green had run elsewhere, only this time within a big partisan candidate campaign. Running another test of phones and mail didn’t excite them much intellectually but it could help remove the cloud of skepticism that had shadowed Gerber and Green since their first experiment: a persistent critique that lessons learned from a nonpartisan New Haven civics project had little to do with the scrum of real politics. “In some instances, they made conclusions that phones weren’t effective based on one call, but they didn’t test multiple calls,” says Jeff Butzke, Perry’s phone vendor. “I’d agree that one call probably wasn’t that effective. More calls, especially on election day, are more important.”

Carney’s doubts about campaign spending extended far beyond phones and mail, however. In 2002, Perry’s opponent, a South Texas businessman named Tony Sanchez, spent $76 million, most of it his own money, including what Perry’s staff estimated was $40 million in ads attacking their candidate. (Perry had moved into the governor’s mansion in January 2001, upon Bush’s election as president.) Perry had spent $28 million and still beat Sanchez by almost twenty points. That disconnect between dollars and votes, along with his natural cynicism about the industry that thrived on it all, drew Carney uncomfortably toward the philosophical. “Dave could sit there and get reflective sometimes,” says Luis Saenz, who was political director of the 2002 campaign. “ ‘Does any of this fucking matter?’ ”

That became, to the political scientists’ surprise, their research agenda for the 2006 election cycle. What had long been off-limits to experimenters as “real politics” was now on the table: Carney was ready to test anything the academics could figure out how to randomize, from lawn signs to television ads. He liked Gimpel’s idea of geocoding fund-raising invitations to learn the optimal radius for drawing people to events. In addition, there were a few things Perry’s advisers were itching to learn. Their candidate was pushing for a more manageable travel schedule in 2006 than he’d had in his previous statewide races; Perry told Carney he wanted to sleep in his own bed at night. Could the professors come up with a system for maximizing the effectiveness of Perry’s personal visits in a way that would allow him to avoid the long itineraries that kept him away from Austin for days at a time?

Perry’s advisers placed only one major restriction on Gerber, Green, Gimpel, and Shaw. They couldn’t publicly discuss their work with the campaign until it was over. The outside consultants and vendors feared press coverage that could embarrass them, but Carney wasn’t much concerned with their feelings. He didn’t want to see leaks that could reveal the campaign’s strategic decisions or unmask differences within the leadership. Other advisers worried that the experiments could make it look as though they were trivializing the work in front of them. “I don’t think we would want any of this out there—that we were just messing around with professors as though we didn’t care about the race,” says Saenz, who became campaign manager. “The reason we were doing this is because we were dead serious about the race.” In exchange for signing to a nondisclosure agreement, the professors were granted what mattered most in a line of work where “publish or perish” is a vital maxim. After November 2006, they would be free to use any findings from the campaign’s work in a journal article or book.

The academics happily agreed to these terms, amazed by their good fortune. They made plans to convene in Chicago to plot specific experiments they wanted to present to the Perry campaign. The four academics sat on the sidelines of the Midwest Political Science Association annual conference, arguing how to exploit an opportunity that had never before been extended to a political scientist. For years, mass media, the dominant form of political communication but the one whose effects were hardest to isolate, had loomed as the holy grail of campaign experiments, and now they were being invited to treat a television advertising budget as their laboratory.

IN THE SPRING OF 2005, Carney stood in an empty Mexican restaurant called the Oasis on Austin’s Lake Travis, in front of what amounted to Perry’s extended political family, and prepared to introduce a quartet of strangers. A crowd of about thirty people were seated, auditorium-style—a group that included the core campaign staff for 2006; a retinue of outside consultants and vendors; Perry and his wife, Anita; and their kitchen cabinet, many of them former aides.

Those who worked for Perry considered him “a dream client,” as Baselice put it: eager to make fund-raising phone calls, willing to defer to his advisers’ guidance and stick to a script when put in front of him. He also showed his personal gratitude to those who served him. After 2002, to congratulate them on his victory, Perry invited members of his core team (including Carney and his wife) to join him climbing Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas. A little over a year later, he rounded up many of the same advisers (including Carney again) for a retreat in the Bahamas, an outing that was nominally devoted to school finance policy but was more hands-on in its treatment of scuba-related issues. (The trip triggered an ethics investigation when it was revealed that the expenses had been paid by political supporters. Perry was eventually cleared of wrongdoing.) “The joke is we’re like the mafia—you only think you get out,” says Deirdre Delisi, who managed Perry’s 2002 campaign before becoming his gubernatorial chief of staff. “Perry inspires a lot of loyalty in terms of people who have worked with him and stayed whether they’re officially in it or not.”

The campaign was preparing for what it expected to be a difficult primary against Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the state comptroller and former Austin mayor. The rivalry was already intense between Perry’s world and Strayhorn’s, and early in the day Carney had set the tone by claiming, “We’re going to rip her leg off and beat her over the head with it!” The statement jarred Bill Noble, who had expected to be attending more of a planning session than a pep rally, one where there would be an open exchange of ideas about strategy but little need to fire up Perry’s loyalists. Then he saw how Carney’s bluster was received by four strangers in their midst. “I just looked over at them, and there was this look of shock,” says Noble. “It turns out it was for effect.”

Carney appeared intent on unsettling everyone at the Oasis restaurant that day: the group of academics he introduced as “our four eggheads” and the political hands they were encountering for the first time. The daylong retreats were a ritual for Perry campaigns—and many in attendance were veterans of past retreats Carney had organized before the 1998 and 2002 races—but this was the first time he had prepared a syllabus. Carney had ordered fifty-five copies of Get Out the Vote! and everyone who was to attend the retreat received one with orders to read it.

Perry would likely begin campaigning in the fall and launch his ad campaign in January, setting up before the March 2006 primary a two-month sprint during which the eggheads could run their experiments. There would then be eight months for them to process the results and analyze the findings, leaving Carney enough time to apply their conclusions to Perry’s general-election tactics. “When you’re spending twenty-five million dollars on an election and you can save two percent, that’s a lot of money. You’ll have more money to spend on something that works,” says Carney, who thought he could boost Perry’s summertime fund-raising power by showing off his rigorous experimental regime to “assure donors that we’re using their money as best as possible—spend it different, spend less of it.”

Don Green began presenting the research that he had done with Alan Gerber over the years, rigorously itemizing all the things that campaigns did that he believed he had proven to be a waste of money. Green did this while facing a room filled with people who had gotten rich off these practices and had been looking ahead to the next Perry campaign as another big payday. Carney likened Green’s talk to “going into the Catholic church telling everyone that Mary wasn’t a virgin, and Jesus really wasn’t her son.” Carney delighted in the face-off he had manufactured, the awkward pitting of academics against professionals—with millions of dollars, control of the country’s second-largest state, and claims of intellectual supremacy all at stake. “Carney is a very confrontational person. That’s how he drags out the best product in people,” says Deirdre Delisi. “What he’s trying to do is force creative thinking.”

There was little evidence of creative thinking at the Oasis that day. In fact, it became apparent pretty quickly to Carney that few of the attendees had read the book closely. Those who might have didn’t look any more persuaded by the experimental methods or conclusions Gerber and Green had reached. The consultants replied as Carney expected they would—in what he called “total denial,” boasting of pieces of mail or phone campaigns that had proven decisive in past elections. One vendor, making the case for robocalls, recalled a legendary voter registration program that featured a recording of a little girl’s voice reminding people to sign up.

“Great,” Carney said, wrapping up the presentation. “One of you is right. Either the eggheads are right or you’re right. We’re going to prove it out, and plan our campaign and allow these guys to develop experiments for everything we do.”

Whenever the eggheads walked into Perry’s Brazos Street headquarters, Gimpel thought, they were seen as the “internal affairs bureau of the police department,” a watchdog monitoring the campaign’s outside vendors. “They don’t want people looking over their shoulders and checking up on them,” he says. When the eggheads were out of earshot, the vendors mused ironically about the prospect that the Yalies were lefty moles. “Let’s hope to God there’s not an e-mail going out to the DNC,” they would joke.

More seriously, randomizing tactics as significant as media buys and candidate travel potentially set Carney up for charges of self-sabotage. Even though the academics had planned their media study in such a way as to make sure it didn’t dangerously undermine Perry’s prospects, the whole point of randomization was for the campaign to do something that it might not have done for strategic reasons. Nonetheless, research objectives were likely to introduce new inefficiencies into the management of the campaign. What if, as part of a candidate travel experiment, the randomizer assigned Perry to do back-to-back visits the same afternoon in El Paso, in the far west corner of the state, and Shreveport, Louisiana, whose media market straddled Texas’s eastern border? “I just wanted to make sure it didn’t get in the way of the campaign,” says Ted Delisi, who was the campaign’s mail vendor (and married to Perry’s chief of staff). “Sometimes you’ve got to get in the car and stomp your foot on the gas and not wonder how the engine works.”

ON JANUARY 2, hours before the deadline to file for the primary ballot, Carole Keeton Strayhorn stood at an Austin high school and declared she was leaving the Republican Party and would run as an independent in the fall. The announcement shocked Perry’s headquarters, which had begun the new year ready for an eight-week sprint until the March 7 election. Instead, their show of strength had earned them a free trip to the general election, where they would likely be part of a four-way race. (Democrats were far from selecting their nominee, and country singer-songwriter and novelist Kinky Friedman was preparing his own independent candidacy.)

But the news unsettled the eggheads, who had designed their most important experiment—staggering Perry’s broadcast advertisements in random waves across the state—to test the effects on the governor’s standing in a two-way primary that would no longer take place. Carney huddled with the eggheads and considered their options. Green argued that, if anything, Strayhorn’s withdrawal was good news for their experiment and that they should continue as planned. Before her move, the eggheads were unsure of how they would deal with the noise that would come from a lively primary—such as the possibility that Strayhorn could focus her ads in specific markets—noise that could distort their ability to isolate the effects of Perry’s randomized buys. All they would do to adjust is open up the polling to all voters and ask them whether they viewed Perry favorably, then test his performance in a four-way general election. Carney decided to strike the last of the four weeks he had allocated for the experimental buy, to stockpile some money for the fall, but gave the eggheads approval to book ad time.

The morning of January 5, Texans awoke to triumphant coverage of the University of Texas Longhorns’ dramatic upset victory in the Rose Bowl’s closing seconds to claim the national championship and seal an undefeated season. Television viewers in five media markets across the state were given another new reason to feel good about their state: Perry’s first ad of the campaign had slipped into the regular rotation on their local news. “I’ve never been more proud to call myself a Texan,” said the tall, strong-featured man standing before the state capitol, where he kept his office, and fighting for screen time against an immodest parade of Lone Star clichés: waving bluebonnets, the Alamo, cattle patrolling a central business district. The governor recounted his policy successes in education, tort reform, and economic development. “Our people are compassionate. Our vision, bold. Our values, strong. The best is yet to come,” he went on. “I’m proud of Texas. How ’bout you?”

The thirty-second ad was standard introductory fare, but the scattered schedule on which it aired looked nothing like the order that David Weeks, who scripted and shot it, would have put in to his media buyer under normal circumstances. Political consultants calculated their buys in terms of gross rating points, or GRPs, the basic unit of measurement for TV exposure; the rule of thumb was that with 1,000 GRPs the average viewer saw each spot ten times in a week. Like most consultants, Weeks—who had begun his career as a campaign spokesman and press secretary—had a set of rules about the size of his ad buys, all grounded in a mix of tradition and instinct. “An ad has to have a certain amount of weight behind it,” he says. An attack ad, Weeks believed, needed between 800 and 1,000 GRPs to have an impact; “you can get by” with 500 to 600 points when pushing a positive message. And Weeks adhered to a widely accepted maxim about the importance of keeping a continuous, steady presence on the air for his candidate: “When you go up, you stay up.”

The eggheads had designed the experiment to deliver its treatment in three doses: 1,000, 500, and 250 GRPs. Markets were assigned their volume randomly, each one rolled out in a staggered fashion so that at any point different markets would be getting Perry’s ads in different volumes, some receiving none at all. (To make the study as unobtrusive to campaign strategy as possible, the eggheads agreed to remove the state’s two largest cities, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth, from the experiment entirely, leaving eighteen media markets. These varied widely in terms of size and demographics and so the academics matched similar ones for balance, reducing the likelihood that the randomizer could end up commanding Perry’s media buyer to shrink its presence in all of conservative West Texas at once, for example, or effectively give up on speaking to Latino voters statewide.) Weeks had never bought only 250 points in a market for Perry, as the campaign found itself doing in Odessa-Midland. At such a low volume, the “Proud” ad found its way into the early-morning local news, Live with Regis and Kelly, and a pair of early-evening game shows—all prime hours to find older viewers who make up the most loyal voters. In Victoria, which received a 1,000-point buy starting the same day, Perry’s declaration of state pride cut a much wider swath through the programming grid, including Oprah, Law & Order, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and an NFL playoff game.

Green would look at the nightly results of one thousand short polling calls being made statewide to see if the ads were having any effect. During the first week of the experiment, Perry’s statewide approval rating was just under 45 percent, and he led the four-way matchup (against Strayhorn, Friedman, and an unnamed Democrat) with 34 percent of the vote. By January 26, every market in the study but one had received Perry ads, although in different volumes, durations, and rhythms. (Abilene had been randomly assigned zero points in each of the three weeks.) Victoria received 1,000 points the whole time, Odessa three weeks at 250, and San Antonio got nothing the first week but two weeks at 500. At the end of the third week, in which the ad appeared in seventeen markets, the polls registered a significant improvement for Perry: his statewide approval rating had moved up to 47 percent, and a much larger share of these registered as “strongly positive” than they had at the start of January, although he fell slightly in the four-way horse race. When the eggheads took apart these numbers to reflect the broadcasts’ distribution and timing, they found that the ads had “sizable effects” on the way voters perceived Perry. His support increased nearly five percentage points per 1,000 GRPs in weeks when his ads aired.

At the end of the third week, the ads stopped. Although Perry did other things befitting a statewide candidate, he ran no more broadcast ads before the primary on March 7. For the final few days before the primary, Green ordered more polling calls. Perry was significantly more popular than he had been just after the new year, with an approval rating over 55 percent. But the eggheads’ regression analysis gave the ads no credit for that movement. Even in Victoria, which received the maximum dose of 1,000 GRPs and saw Perry’s standing jump by six percentage points over those three weeks, the ads’ power had worn off by March. The ads may have delivered sizable effects on the weeks in which they ran, the eggheads concluded, but they decayed rapidly. Much of Weeks’s folklore was right: if your goal was to move public opinion, it made sense to wait to go on TV until you would be able to sustain the buy.

Shaw thought that was an important conclusion, but he believed that to reach it Green had made a major trade-off. By staggering the buys for a nuanced understanding of how opinions move over time, the experimenters had decided to be in fewer markets on any given day. As a result, Shaw thought, they had sacrificed the power of the data to illuminate how much advertising moved public opinion at all. Shaw had argued that the campaign should run two different ads as part of the experiment, to be able to measure their relative impact, and lost out to Green. “The real weakness of the study is it’s a single ad, and you’re extrapolating from that,” says Shaw. “You could make an argument that okay, there’s a diminution of effects, but that’s just because it’s not a very memorable ad.”

Much of Shaw’s personal research addressed one of the most vexing questions in the study of elections: do campaigns matter? The first postwar studies, like the Michigan scholars who pioneered the National Election Studies, argued that the factors that drove voters’ choices—their social networks or party identification—moved more slowly than any individual election season. It suggested that the quadrennial pageant of candidates crisscrossing the country was all but incidental to an outcome that was effectively preordained. In the 1970s, political scientists believed they could explain all presidential elections with the same formulae. The most important inputs were presidential approval ratings and national economic indicators, reduced by statistical models to a neat set of rules: if the economy was growing faster than 1.2 percent annually, the incumbent president would win. It didn’t matter how much money he raised, if his ads were any good, or whether his opponent looked presidential. The winner had basically been determined by June.

Shaw’s own experience gave him good reason to be skeptical of this thesis that campaigns had “minimal effects.” By its standards, Shaw’s boss in the 2000 campaign should have been a certain loser. Al Gore entered the nearly two-year election cycle as the tribune of a party with a popular incumbent in the White House, presiding over a very healthy economy. An average of seven academic election-forecasting models (using these criteria and others) presented at the American Political Science Association conference that August predicted that Gore should have carried 56 percent of the popular vote against Bush in a two-way contest. But by November, the Republican had turned the election into nearly a tie. (Gore won 50.2 percent of the two-party vote, leading Bush by a little more than 500,000 votes.) Some of those in the minimal-effects school responded by adjusting the economic indicators that went into the models or arguing that Gore’s inability to focus on the economy mitigated the importance of those conditions to voters. But Shaw thought that basically conceded the point. Bush had run a better race than Gore. What they did mattered. Campaigns had effects.

As a graduate student, Shaw had been unsatisfied with previous works that had attempted to answer this question by relying only on survey data or laboratory experiments attempting to measure what types of political communication could shift voters’ preferences. “While experiments allow researchers to isolate the influence of particular effects, critics question whether such a controlled environment is comparable to the hurly-burly of an actual campaign,” Shaw wrote. Instead, he reconstructed candidates’ electoral-college strategies, relying on professional contacts where necessary to understand how past campaigns had selected the states in which they chose to compete and how they allocated resources among them. In the 1980s, presidential candidates largely stopped buying national ads from the three networks and started going to local affiliates in their targeted states. As a result, campaigns began to rigorously divide the country into battleground and nonbattleground states—devoting time and resources to the former and completely avoiding the latter. It created, in effect, a natural (if nonrandomized) experiment that Shaw could test, and he was able to determine that the amount of money a candidate spent in a state did affect the share of the vote he won there, albeit in a minor way.

But TV ads were only one of the “most obvious and visible manifestations of the campaign,” as Shaw wrote in his dissertation. The other was the candidate’s own travel—the whistle-stop tours and bus trips and swelling rallies that provided the country’s dominant political iconography and drove daily news coverage within an election year. What was more of a campaign effect than a visit from the candidate? Major campaigns, especially those covering enough turf that transit time was a consideration, negotiated the candidate’s itinerary with more attention than anything else. “At the end of the day there are two finite resources in every campaign: money and time,” says Deirdre Delisi, “and the most valuable time is the principal’s time.” It was possible to put a price on an hour of the candidate’s day, whatever he or she could bring making fund-raising calls over that time. But no one knew how to weigh that against the political value of shaking hands in a diner or giving a speech to a neighborhood association.

American history may have been filled with anecdotes of campaigns swayed by the schedule, like how in the last days before the 1960 election, Richard Nixon, holding to a pledge to visit every state, flew to Alaska instead of trying to sway voters in deadlocked Illinois. But in the current era of ubiquitous television and Internet coverage, wondered Shaw, did a politician’s physical presence have any impact?

ON JANUARY 10, Rick Perry strode into the Frazier Alumni Pavilion, a shed covered with Spanish-style clay roof tiles and attached to Texas Tech’s sixty-thousand-seat football stadium. On autumn Saturdays the pavilion was popular for fancy pregame parties, but on a Tuesday morning in January it housed one hundred supporters, many of them wearing Perry 2006 stickers. “There’s been seven times I’ve stood before the people in this state and asked them to place their trust in me,” Perry said, as university flags fluttered from wooden rafters overhead, “and I have never been defeated.”

For Texas Tech’s daily student newspaper, the Daily Toreador, the news the next morning was not about anything specific Perry said but that he had chosen Lubbock as the first stop on his “I’m proud of Texas” tour. “I think people are finally starting to see what’s great about Lubbock,” the county’s newly appointed district attorney, Matt Powell, told the paper. “It speaks volumes that he chose Lubbock to come and kick off his campaign.” Congressman Randy Neugebauer noted that “the governor has been a fiscal conservative, and he chose a city that’s fiscally conservative to launch in.”

None of those factors, however, explains the decision to hold the inaugural stop of Perry’s reelection campaign in Lubbock. In fact, it wasn’t really a decision at all: the selection had been made by randomization software on Daron Shaw’s office computer at Texas Tech’s rival, the University of Texas. The computer had also decided to send Perry by plane from Lubbock to Addison, outside Dallas—where he visited a Texas Instruments plant under construction—and then later in the day to Tyler and Beaumont. It could have just as easily dispatched him to make his debut in deep-blue McAllen or famously liberal Austin.

Carney had given Shaw the authority to control Perry’s travel for a three-day campaign swing, his first of the election cycle and scheduled to begin just as Perry’s “Proud” ads were completing their first week in rotation. The candidate would do four events a day, each in a different media market, and Shaw would randomly assign them. Campaign staff would do the rest, choosing where in each market Perry should appear and what type of event—a speech? a factory tour? a town-hall meeting?—it would be.

Carney had his own hunch that the candidate’s presence mattered, a lesson he learned the hard way. In 1992, when he had served as George H. W. Bush’s political director, campaign strategists had responded to Bush’s poor performance in a town-hall debate in Richmond, Virginia—he was seen checking his watch midway through a voter’s question—by having the candidate hunker down in the White House to prepare for the final debate four days later. “It wasn’t until that moment that we were able to actually show that in those four days there was a tremendous difference, when every day Bill Clinton was doing something, even if it was only jogging. When we didn’t campaign, we were off television, off the screen,” Carney said immediately after the election. “It was the fatal flaw: we should have been doing something to get back in the mix.”

But a decade later, Carney still had no idea how those dynamics really worked. He agreed to give Shaw the nightly polling data from Butzke’s calls, along with the campaign’s information on its fund-raising intake and volunteer sign-up. Shaw would be able to segregate it all by day and location. If going to Lubbock actually made people there more likely to vote for Perry, volunteer for his campaign, or give money, Shaw would be able to tell.

When Shaw reviewed the local media, he saw that Perry’s physical presence had a remarkable ability to drive coverage. In the twelve media markets Perry visited, he earned a report on the evening TV news in nine of them and a story in the next morning’s newspaper in all twelve. And unlike the stories produced by the Austin bureaus of the big Texas papers, which Perry’s aides often felt were unfair to their boss, the local coverage of his trips was almost exclusively positive. When Shaw coded the stories in all twelve markets on a five-point scale of how good they made Perry look, they found that the campaign stop warmed the tone of the coverage in all but one. In the eight control markets that Perry didn’t visit, the governor was barely covered in the media during the same period.

Shaw could tell that Perry was boosted by the warm reception he got on the road. Contributions went up in the cities that he visited, along with the number of new volunteers. Across the twelve markets, Perry’s approval rating went up from 41 to 46 percent, with his unfavorable number dropping slightly. While Perry gained four points in the four-way horse race, his lead over Chris Bell, the likely Democratic nominee, remained steady, though, each of them appearing to benefit from voters abandoning the two independent candidates. Shaw assumed, sensibly, that this meant that Perry’s presence energized not only Republicans but Democrats, too. When Shaw went back the following week, however, Perry’s lead hadn’t evaporated the way his TV-aided boost had. He held on to four points he had gained.

This was a valuable insight for Carney, who seemed comfortable, even satisfied, when he learned that something that had been a staple of traditional campaign practice wasn’t as valuable as everyone had assumed. “You always think technology can make the difference. In a state as big as Texas, if you can sit in a studio and do twelve interviews on the nightly news in six markets in the time it takes you to go out to Lubbock,” Carney reflected after the tests, “the actual visits make a bigger, more lasting impact than just being on the news. It makes you realize it’s a better use of your time.”

Among the eggheads, however, the findings reinvigorated the unsettled debate over campaign effects. They knew that mail and canvassing could have limited incremental effects on voting behavior, enough to influence a race at its margins but not to dramatically alter its structure. Now they had revealed that the dominant political medium was lousy at delivering permanent shifts in public opinion. Campaigns, it seemed, were always going to raise as much money as they could, but political science was running out of useful recommendations on where to spend it. Was there any place a campaign could direct its money in the service of dramatically changing its fortunes? “It says: all these things we’ve been working on so hard are a waste of time and we probably need to be doing something else,” says Gimpel. “Sometimes, the answer to that question—what is the alternative activity?—isn’t that clear. Well, what else should we be doing?”